At the beginning of the twentieth century, when corruption in city government ran rampant in large American cities, one of the original muckrakers—so named by Theodore Roosevelt for their aggressive journalistic tactics in investigating controversial stories—was Lincoln Steffens. Steffens hounded corrupt city officials all across the United States. He faced numerous death threats and stood up to local political machines in many cities, including Pittsburgh, New York City, and Minneapolis. His first effort at a story came in Philadelphia, where he compared the local extortionists' control of the city voting to that of the disenfranchisement of African-Ameri-cans in the South. He wrote in McClure's magazine, "The honest citizens of Philadelphia have no more rights at the polls than the Negroes in the South." Over the course of his career, Steffen's muckraking led to the indictment of eighteen municipal legislators in St. Louis...